On the north-west coast of Turkey, atop a hill overlooking the mouth of the Dardanelles, lies the memory of a city which blurs the line between myth and history like no other.
In mythology, Troy inspired the Greek epic poet Homer to conceive his two great works in (probably) the eighth century BC: the Iliad – set in the final year of the decade-long siege of Troy by a coalition of Greek states – and its “sequel”, the Odyssey.
In reality, it was said the city witnessed one of the greatest battles in Greek history. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, the fifth-century BC historian Thucydides describes the Trojan war as “notable beyond all previous wars”.
But the precise location – and even the very existence – of Troy has been a source of dispute throughout the ages. Reputedly razed after a battle in around 1200 BC, the city was later reinhabited by both the Greeks and Romans and renamed Ilios/Ilium. It decayed into insignificance by 500BC, and was lost until two centuries ago.
Now Troy’s location is widely believed to be the site of Hisarlik in Turkey: essentially a mound of 30 metres or so in height, with the remnants of stone walls and lonely structures scattered in the grassland. Within this meadowed hill may lie 4,000 years of Trojan history.
Indeed, there was likely not just one city here, but at least 10. The Hisarlik site contains layer upon layer of ancient settlement, from the first circa 3000 BC to the last around 500 BC. It is now generally believed that the sixth and seventh construction phases (the late Bronze Age cities referred to as Troy VI and Troy VIIa) could be King Priam’s city, as described in the Iliad.
Troy’s modern-day story begins, allegedly, with the dream of a little boy. So fascinated was he by the myth, after seeing an illustration in a book given to him by his father, that he set out to find the city.
That seven-year-old was Henrich Schliemann, the 19th-century German businessman-turned-archaeologist who was the first to comprehensively excavate at the site of Hisarlik. He was “among the luckiest individuals ever to put a shovel into the earth”, writes archaeologist and historian Eric Cline in his short introduction to the Trojan War.
How the amateur archaeologist Schliemann managed to find Troy and kick off the field of Aegean prehistory is nothing short of astounding. He was, however, prone to falsifying his excavation journals, which might also put the veracity of that childhood dream in doubt.
In April 1870, Schliemann began to dig at Hisarlik. Soon he claimed to have found the “burnt city” of Homer’s Troy, and among it King Priam’s treasure – some of which he later famously gave his wife to wear. In the process, however, “he threw away the thing he was going to look for,” says Cline.
Schliemann dug through – and decimated – layers and layers of Bronze Age Troy (1700-1200 BC), until he reached what is now known as Troy II: a city more than 1,000 years older than the Troy of the Iliad.
“If you look on excavation maps, there’s a gap in the middle where it says ‘Palace removed by Schliemann’. He got Priam’s palace and then threw it away,” Cline says. “He found Troy, but he also destroyed Troy.”
A grand Bronze Age city
The city of Troy started as a simple settlement in around 3000 BC, growing and thriving on trade, agriculture and fishing. There were found to be nine major phases of construction before the city’s major destruction, in approximately 1180 BC.
However, since there aren’t any contemporary texts that describe Troy, and as Schliemann managed to ruin the remains of what could well have been King Priam’s city, we actually know very little about it.
The historicity of the Trojan War and the fall of the city at the hands of the Greeks (the narrative of the Iliad) was still questionable until the groundbreaking work of archaeologist Manfred Korfmann in the 1990s. Until then, excavations in Hisarlik had revealed only an insignificant town, but Korfmann and his team discovered a lower city that covered 75 acres: 15 times larger than was previously thought.
These findings suggested that Troy was, “by the standards of this region at that time, very large indeed, and most certainly of supraregional importance,” Korfmann wrote in Archaeology magazine in 2004. “Its citadel was unparalleled in the wider region and, as far as hitherto known, unmatched anywhere in southeastern Europe.”
“That’s what nailed it for me for the identification,” says Cline, who suggests the Troy that Homer describes could in fact be a hybrid of Troy VI and VIIa. The sixth construction layer is thought to have been destroyed by an earthquake, rather than the Greeks – although one tenuous theory suggests that the legendary Trojan horse was an allegory for the god Poseidon, whose animal was a horse. Also known as “Earth shaker”, Poseidon could have represented the destruction of the city by a natural disaster.
On the other hand, Troy VIIa – a city with much less grandeur than the Troy described by Homer – was almost certainly destroyed by a major battle, as archaeologists have found arrowheads in the remains of the citadel. So is this evidence of the Trojan war?
Nobody is sure. Cline suggests that with the whole area in turmoil at the time, a single major battle between forces of east and west is unlikely. “The fall of Troy is part of the larger picture of the fall of the entire Bronze Age,” he says. “The whole G8 of the ancient world goes down.”
With a little creativity, however, Homer’s words can be made to place Priam’s city at the site in Turkey. The great poet says Troy is steep and windy, much like Hisarlik. He describes it as “strong-founded”, “gate-towering”, with “wide ways” (streets) and an “indestructible citadel”. He presents an image of a large city run by a powerful elite, protected by magnificent walls; a grand Bronze Age city that would have housed between 4,000 and 10,000 inhabitants.
It is from these walls that some of Troy’s greatest losses are witnessed in the Iliad. In book 22, there is the heart-wrenching moment when Hector’s wife sees the fallen hero’s dead body being dragged by Achilles in front of the city: “The running horses dragged him at random toward the hollow ships of the Achaians. The darkness of night misted over the eyes of Andromache.”
The walls that play such an important role for the Troy of the Iliad could also be linked to Hisarlik: parts of the bottom walls, still visible today, are 4-5m wide and 8m high. These walls had multiple towers and gates that would have led directly to the city centre.
The citadel, home to the ruling elite, was a densely occupied area with monumental buildings and two-storey houses of extensive rooms. As city planning didn’t come along until the classical period of the Iron Age, according to Joritt Kelder of Oxford University’s Oriental Institute, “so far the only real division is who has power and who doesn’t. The power was clearly focused on the citadel, with the king and his immediate family and friends.”
A multicultural city
There is no doubt that Troy was a major city of strategic importance throughout the Bronze Age. Its location guarding the Dardanelles meant it was effectively the gateway to the Black Sea, and held an important trade route.
Sandwiched between the Mycenaean world to the west and the Hittites to the east, it was the meeting point of two opposing cultures. And it seems Troy thrived as a multicultural city: archaeologists have found evidence of cultural foreign influence, such as local potters making Mycenaean pots with their own Trojan touch. There is also evidence of extensive trade with Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) and the Bronze Age civilisations in Greece. It was, for the time, a very cosmopolitan city.
“It’s a bit like London,” says Kelder, “a capital with lots of foreign influence as a result of trade and migration. I have no doubt that foreigners were residents of Troy in the 14th–13th century BC as well.”
Not only did the city seem to accept different cultures, but Troy and the mythology behind it had an impact on a global scale. The Persian king Xerxes, on his expedition through Greece, was said to have made an offering to Athena at Troy. One hundred and fifty years later Alexander the Great, who went on to conquer the Persian empire, stopped off at Troy on his journey, and allegedly took the shield of Achilles from the temple of Athena. He also carried a copy of the Iliad on his expeditions.
Even the Romans claimed to have descended from the Trojans. In the Aeneid, Roman poet Virgil narrates the story of the Trojan Aeneas, who escaped from the war, travelled to Italy and turned out to be one of Rome’s founding fathers. (The Aeneid was arguably written as a piece of propaganda for Emperor Augustus, linking himself to this Trojan hero.)
Troy has continually inspired western culture – from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida to Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 Hollywood take on the Iliad with Brad Pitt. This is a city whose representation of heroism and political identity, and poignant reminder of human mortality, has touched people throughout the centuries.
As the Greek epigrammist Euenus wrote, the city itself may be lost and its very existence still debated, but “in Homer I [Troy] still exist, protected by bronze gates. The spears of the destroying Greeks shall not again dig me up, but I shall be on the lips of all Greeks.”
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